When you’re weighed down with a name like Prince Birabongse Bhanutej Bhanubandh, you’ve got to do something about it if you want to go motor racing, so this Siamese tongue twister became B. Bira. That was the pseudonym under which a small, doll-like grandson of King Mongkut, played by Yul Brynner in the Fifties hit film The King and I, made his name in motor sport. Bira was sent to Britain from Siam in 1927, when he was 13 years…

Driving ERA R2B, otherwise known as “Romulus,” the Prince won two heats and the final at Crystal Palace’s London Grand Prix meeting.